Hillman Imp

The Hillman Imp is one of 23 Hillman models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1963. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Hillman Imp properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1960s were the decade of the pony car, the mid-engined revolution and the birth of the modern hot hatchback's ancestors — engineering advanced faster than in any decade before it. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Pontiac Pontiac GTO, the Buick Buick Riviera, the Maserati Maserati Quattroporte — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Hillman Imp reads like this: the record lists its engine as 875 cc, 998 cc straight-4 overhead camshaft water-cooled aluminium block; kerb weight is recorded at 725 kg; drive goes through 4-speed manual all-synchromesh; the layout is RR layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear. Production is recorded at 440,032 units, which makes it a solid production run.

Its place in the Hillman story

Within Hillman's own catalogue the Hillman Imp sits alongside the Hillman "Sixteen", "Hawk" and "80", the Hillman 14, the Hillman 20 8-cylinder, the Hillman Avenger. The record names the successor = Chrysler Sunbeam as its predecessor and the Chrysler Sunbeam as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Michael Parkes / Tim Fry. Assembly is recorded at Linwood, Renfrewshire / Linwood, Scotland / Australia / Costa Rica / Republic of Ireland / Ireland / Malaysia / Malta / New Zealand / Philippines / Portugal / South Africa / Urugua.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Hillman Imp costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.